On Wed, 16 Nov 2011, Luke S. Crawford wrote:
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 04:36:29PM -0800, [email protected] wrote:
I would be _really_ surprised if there were no entry-level jobs for
mechanics that did not require certification, a 4-year training before you
can start work is rather extreme, even in law you can work before you pass
the bar, and you can prepare your own legal documents with no
certification at all.
Most regulated trades in America have pretty trivial governmental
licensing requirements; as far as I can tell, I could become a real
estate agent by cramming for a few days and taking the test. If I
wanted to be a broker I'd have to work for several years as an agent
/or/ get a degree (In anything.)
You can become a licensed electrician in California, again by taking a
written test (that looks multiple choice- I estimate that if I tried,
I could cram for a week and pass the test.) paying a small fee and getting
some insurance.
Actually, I beleive that there is an 'apprenticeship' requirement where
you have to have someone sign off that you have been working under
supervision for two years.
I know that to be a licensed contractor there is such a requirement
(however, you are allowed to build your own house without being a licensed
contractor, and doing so counts as one year towards the time requirement)
I mean, I think that many unions started from a very adversarial place;
and as far as I can tell, as SysAdmins, there isn't that adversarial
feeling, so I think that even if we tried to build an adversarial
organization, we would fail; our own peers would tear us down.
agreed, I would love to see a Union boss try to go around and tell this
croud that they have to do things a specific way :-)
But, I think there is still plenty of room for someone to make a credible
"This person knows the basics" certification; and I think that kind
of certification is useful to some (especially smaller) employers that
are hiring outside of their existing areas of expertise. I mean,
there are already plenty of competing certification providers.
agreed
It's possible, too, that we should focus on the training side of things,
rather than on the certification side of things. Even though we aren't
starting from an adversarial stance, if we certify SysAdmins, there will
always be that conflict of interest (we are an organization of SysAdmins;
Certifications are for the benefit of non-technical employers that
hire SysAdmins.)
I mean, one positive thing we could do is to coordinate with employers
and with new and experienced SysAdmins to help organize mentoring and
apprenticeship/internship programs.
sounds reasonable
I mean, right now, as far as I can
tell, most internship programs are based largely on nepotism and they
require that the intern be a college student; this usually means
that the company overlooks the people that need the training the
most, and that the company loses the intern at the end of the summer.
I think an internship program targeting young people that aren't in school
would do a lot of good for the kids, and maybe for the companies, too.
I think one problem with 'internship' is the idea that these people are
willing to work for no money for just the experience.
Rather than thinking 'internship', I think we need to be thinking in terms
of "someone thinks they are interested in the field, how can we find out
if they have the talent, and if they are really interested in the field"
This should include not just what training and tasks they are assigned at
work, but also assignements for them to tackle on their own.
With cheap, but powerful access points readily available, how about
designing a program that walks them through something along the lines of:
get a WNDR3800 router (~$150, 680 MHz, 128M ram, 128M flash dual-band
access point with a USB port)
flash it with openwrt and configure it for trivial outbound access
configure the radios to be separate networks (various security measures
involved)
configure it to be a mail server
configure it to be a file server (add a cheap USB drive)
configure it to be an asterisk server
enable IPv6
implement a monitoring system (nagios or similar)
implement a log monitoring system (if this is exposed to the Internet,
logging denied traffic will produce enough logs to make this interesting)
implement a IDS system
get hold of a second one and implement high availability failover between
them.
etc.
thoughts?
David Lang
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